Open AccessStrengthening the Capacity of Emergency Medical Services in Low and Middle Income Countries using Dispatcher-Coordinated Taxis
Author(s) -
Vipul Kumar Mishra,
Richa Ahuja,
N. Nezamuddin,
Geetam Tiwari,
Kavi Bhalla
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
transportation research record
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.624
H-Index - 119
eISSN - 2169-4052
pISSN - 0361-1981
DOI - 10.1177/0361198120929024
Subject(s) - taxis , crash , transport engineering , emergency medical services , low and middle income countries , business , operations management , medical emergency , developing country , computer science , engineering , economic growth , medicine , economics , programming language
International standards recommend provision of 1 ambulance for every 50,000 people to fulfil demand for transporting patients to definitive care facilities in Low and Middle Income Countries (LMICs). Governments' consistent attempt to build capacity of emergency medical services (EMS) in LMICs has been financially demanding. This study is an attempt to assess the feasibility of capacity building of existing EMS in Delhi, India by using taxis as an alternative mode of transport for emergency transportation of road traffic crash victims to enable improvement in response time for road traffic crashes where time criticality is deemed important. Performance of the proposed system is evaluated based on response time, coverage and distance. The system models the performance and quantifies the taxi - ambulance configuration for achieving EMS performance within international standards.